1. Field of Invention
This invention relates to an improved system and method for the creation of staff schedules at remote locations that take into account location specific values and historical data, while simultaneously conforming to corporate policy regarding scheduling standards and labor regulations.
Managing multi-unit retail locations that are geographically dispersed is a challenging task, and a key to successful operation of multi-unit retailing or chain franchising is consistency. Training location managers to be consistent in applying company standards is subject to each location manager's interpretation of the company standards. Complex federal, state and local labor regulations require additional training of the location manager to assure compliance, for example, with state-required minimum and maximum shift lengths, required paid and unpaid breaks, and labor regulations which place additional restrictions on employees who are minors. High rates of personnel turnover in this segment of the market further complicates this task. If this task could be successfully taught, the expense of constantly retraining replacement personnel would be high.
The job of creating staff schedules is complex, and involves such variables as the definitions of each task, the percentage of an employee's time that it takes to do a particular task, the day of the week, month, or year in which the task should be performed, the skill levels of employees available to perform each task, resource constraints such as equipment capacity at the location that facilitate or prevent a task from being scheduled, relationships between tasks that affect their placement and movement on the schedule, calculations for each task for a task's length, start time, positive and negative tolerances in completing a task, and employee availability by day of the week, hours of the day, their skill level and priority or seniority levels or categories.
Each remote location has unique differences in layout, sales patterns, sales volume, and product mix. These differences are further complicated by the uniqueness of each day of the week and seasonality of the year. Such variables must be combined and examined to create a unique optimum staff schedule for each remote location. Creating an optimum schedule is a job which does not lend itself to be taught well to the typically minimum wage employee of a multi-unit retail organization. The complexity of creating an optimized staff schedule approaches the complexity of linear programming and the solving of multiple simultaneous equations. These are processes that the human mind is not well suited to perform.
As a result organizations resort to a substandard and labor-intensive manual method of creating staff schedules that are typically not optimized for the tasks.
2. Summary of the Invention
Accordingly, the present invention provides an automated staff scheduling system and method in which the variables associated with making an optimum staff schedule can be defined, maintained, and consistently applied. The present invention also provides an automated staff scheduling system and method which can be operated by relatively unskilled operators and which requires little technical knowledge or supervision. Also, the present invention provides an automated staff scheduling system which represents and utilizes a corporation's staffing policy when creating staff schedules at each remote location. In addition, the present invention provides a method which incorporates state, federal and local labor regulations (referred to herein as `state` regulations) and corporate policy when creating schedules.
Accordingly, the present invention obviates the above mentioned drawbacks of the prior art systems and provides a system and method for generating optimum staff schedules that are unique to each of a plurality of remote locations given a plurality of variables. These optimum schedules take into account: the tasks that need to be scheduled and when they should be scheduled; the skill levels of employees that are available to perform the tasks; the resources available to facilitate tasks; the relationships between tasks; calculations to combine unique location values with unique location historical data and corporate policy to determine the length, start time, and positive and negative slide for a task; employee availability by day of the week, and hours of the day, skill level, and priority of seniority levels; and applicable `state` labor regulations. As used herein, positive and negative slide for a task refers to the latitude or tolerance of shifting the end point(s) of a task forward or backward in time. The present system and method thus minimizes the training times required for location managers and brings more expertise to bear on this complex task than is possible with traditional manual scheduling schemes.